Support the VCH in Gloucestershire

You can support the VCH in Gloucestershire by making either a one-off donation, or a regular standing order, to the Gloucestershire County History Trust, using the pdf form at the foot of this page.

If you'd like to make an online commission-free donation right now, please visit our BT MyDonate page - thankyou!

The VCH set of volumes for Gloucestershire is currently about half-complete; it's taken a century to do the first half, but we'd really like not to spend another hundred years finishing it! This is where you come in, by helping us to up the pace. Since 2010, when previous funding arrangements ceased, a county support trust, the Gloucester County History Trust (registered charity no. 1138520) has been busy raising funds, in line with a business plan adopted by trustees in February 2011.

Thanks to the support of many individuals, greatly assisted by substantial grants from the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society for 2011-13 and 2015-16, work on the partially-completed VCH Gloucestershire Vol. XIII restarted in October 2011, and three new volumes are in hand. Five years on Volume XIII and a 'Short' on Yate (part of Volume XIV) have been published and we intend to publish a 'Short' on the early history of Cheltenham in 2017.

The Trust calculates that up to 20 further volumes will be needed to cover the historic county of Gloucestershire, and has established provisional costings for this work (see below). This will help inform funding bids and local target-setting.

Latest News

At the foot of this page, you can download our latest 'Academy Newsletters' - covering the latest activity by our editors and volunteers.

Gloucestershire: future work, and how much it might cost

To inform future fundraising strategies, the Gloucestershire County History Trust has worked out indicative costs for covering the remaining 150+ parishes. We have done this by starting with a basic calculation of size – acreage x population – then putting each parish into one of three broad categories: simple rural parish, complex rural parish, small town. Using local knowledge, we assign a degree-of-difficulty factor.

Guided by the typical number of pages given to places in each category in already-issued volumes, we can then make a reasonable estimate of pages to be allocated to future parishes. From that we can derive indicative costs for each piece of work. We stress that these are indicative only (and reflect only the county-based research and writing up, not publication).

However, the estimates help shape tactical decisions about what can be done with available funds, and how future fundraising might be approached. Finding (say) £250,000 to do a complete hundred of 20 parishes is definitely daunting, but finding £10-12K over 3 or 4 years to do a single parish is much more within the realm of the possible.

In the attached Word doc below, we show the possible contents of a further 18 volumes (about two per historic hundred) and our page and cost estimates for each parish. NB, no estimates for Bristol are included at this stage - the work is beyond our practical planning horizon.

(In case you missed it the first time) The trust continues to actively seek further funding

You can support the VCH in Gloucestershire by making either a one-off donation, or a regular standing order, to the Gloucestershire County History Trust, using the pdf form at the foot of this page.

If you'd like to make an online commission-free donation right now, please visit our BT MyDonate page - thankyou!

For those in a position to consider supporting our work with a legacy, we have prepared an information leaflet, attached below.

Your donation could fund research and the writing of parish or urban histories by full-time historians and volunteers, who also will contribute their discoveries to our Explore website.

Please consider getting involved with VCH research into your own town or village, and in fundraising for work to start there.